2008/11/24

Although we haven't formally been accepted, I wanted to announce the formation of the local chapter of the Heart Project, which I've called "I heart New York". The idea is to participate in the development of an RDF store for Hadoop/Hbase. The main project is based mainly in Korea, which is just a bit too far for most people to travel, but there is quite a bit of interest in very large RDF databases here, so it seemed a good idea to have a local group. It will be attached to the NYC Semantic Web meetup group that Marco Neumann organizes, which is already one of the world's largest semantic web interest groups.So, why am I interested, being the security geek that I am? Well, RDF and sematic web technology interests me in two ways. First of all, there is it's use in Data Centric Security. However, the other angle that I have is the encoding, exchange and reasoning over security relevant data expressed in RDF, or at the very least, using constrained (and well-defined) vocabularies. However, while looking at the amount of data that we at Trend Micro collect, I realized that no current system can handle it all. Furthermore, since we are working with a Hadoop infrastructure, it would be appropriate to leverage it. This led me to Heart.If you are interested in the Heart project I'd encourage you to join in and if you are a New York local, then join our chapter, too!

2008/11/19

So, I guess I'm not surprised, but Metrocards do contain ID information allowing the user to be tracked, see the New York Times article on a recent case. If you bought your card with a credit or debit card, then you can be identified, too.I guess this has to be considered a normal infraction of our privacy nowadays -- along with credit cards, social security numbers, EZ-Pass fobs, ...